Diet Cig is an acclaimed two piece band known for catchy hooks and fun, honest lyrics. To celebrate their latest album Do You Wonder About Me? The band curated a comics anthology inspired by the album featuring work by Sabrina Mellado, Shelby Criswell, Kit Fraser, Daniel Torraca, Arantza Pena Popo, Daniel Zhou, Viktoria Cichon, Kailee Kanawada, Sam Twardy and Catherina Riesgo. They sat down with ComicsXF on day 6 of hand printing the book to chat about the project.
Zachary Jenkins: Punk has a long history of, you know, being associated with like DIY culture, zines, all of that nature of things. Do you see this anthology as an extension of that or coming from that or somewhere completely different?
Alex Luciano: We’re doing it all ourselves, so you can say it is DIY. And I think obviously our band has been heavily influenced by all the punks of the past. The medium that we’re printing it on is a Risograph, a stencil duplicator that has been used extensively for zine making in a DIY kind of sense for the past 10 years. And so I feel like a lot of people have blazed this trail for us to get to do this project. So I would definitely say it was pretty easy for this like comic to go hand in hand with our like punk music, because there’s such a strong connection between the two that’s already been established.
ZJ: For people that don’t know anthology inspired by your latest album Do You Wonder About Me? it’s taking the 10 tracks on that album and making mini comics out of them. What about your music made the most sense to translate into comics as a medium?
AL: I think a lot of times comics can be really personal. The comics we really enjoy reading are often autobiographical in a sense or a little slice of life into the artists’ world. And so I think our songs are so much so of that. They’re very autobiographical. They tell a story a lot of the times cause most of the songs are about stuff that’s actually happened to us, so it made a lot of sense to collaborate in this way. I feel like it’s just like another form of storytelling and we really enjoyed with this album cycle leaning into the visual aspect of our whole, you know, Diet Cig world. And so this kind of just felt like a natural step forward to expand the Diet Cig world in the ways in which we’re able to storytell.
ZJ: Now you said have slice live comics that you enjoy. What were you reading that before this?
AL: Oh my gosh, let me go. I got to look at my bookshelf. There are all these like weird little mini comics. I’m going to see what I got. I forget all the names. [Ed. note: Alex stands up, rushes out of frame]
Noah Bowman: I was reading Ether. We read all the Saga books, like at least four or five times. But she’s got all these kinds of like more specific little like kind of independent storytellers or something. I don’t know. We have like a huge bookshelf of just like random stuff. [Ed. note: Alex returns, excited]
AL: Okay. I just grabbed the first one I could find that I read recently because I didn’t want to take forever. But this one, Relish is one that I’ve loved. It’s centered around food and the author’s experience, growing up with food and it’s just, it’s so good. It’s about her life and a little bit about her upbringing with like chef parents, but also has a lot of recipes in it. And so it was really fun to kind of catch a glimpse of such a food centered upbringing. But yeah, it’s called Relish by Lucy Knisely, but that’s one that I really enjoyed recently.
ZJ: Well, that’s awesome. I’m a big, I say, fan of food, like everyone doesn’t eat several times a day, but love cooking and all that. So that’s, that’s something I had not checked out. I’m going to have to add that to my list.
AL: Yeah, it’s really good. It’s really a quick read in a good way, you know, like you just want to tear through it because I love hearing the way people describe food in books, but then to also see that paired with like visual art is, is really cool.
ZJ: Now, speaking of pairing things with visual art, what were you guys looking for in terms of the creators that you worked with while you were curating this anthology?
AL: So it was really hard first of all, to curate it. We put out an open call for people to send us their contact info and their website and we have over a hundred artists apply. And obviously we only had 10 spots. We were like, oh, how do we like narrow this down? We were looking for folks who had the connection with our band in the first place. We thought it would be really cool to get to collaborate with our fans. We looked for people who had experience with formatting for risograph printing. So not everyone who is in the anthology has formatted for it before, but like a handful of people had. So we were looking for that and we also were just looking to have like a diverse group of people. So we wanted different styles different points of view from people. And so we were trying to keep it, so it wasn’t all like the same style. So we, we tried to do our best to curate it, so that each page in, in little spread felt like especially unique. But otherwise we just kind of base it off of whose comics we liked. It was really fun to just look through everyone’s work and see who got us the most excited.
ZJ: Now that you mentioned in this last album cycle, you would focus a lot on like the visual identity of the album and how you were presenting that. Did you want to try and maintain that same vision throughout this anthology? Or did you want to kind of mix it up and see what other angles you could take on the album?
AL: Well we definitely wanted to mix it up because we had a really strong aesthetic that ran through our whole album release. But for this, we kind of let the artists run with whatever their vision was. I pretty much we gave them the options of what color inks we had for the riso and the song itself. And, you know, we said each comic would be two colors, we gave parameters, but otherwise we were like, do whatever you want, like any colors, any vision that you guys have. So it was kind of fun to like invite other perspectives and like interpretations of the album into our world.
ZJ: Good, good. Now speaking of the album, it came out May 1st of last year, right in the midst of the pandemic and that we all have been living through. The music industry specifically has been hit very hard by that. I think you guys have done a few like live stream shows, but you can’t really tour when venues aren’t open and people are not congregating. Has there been anything about the comic that’s been refreshing to have that creative outlet for you?
AL: Yeah. I feel like the collaboration of at all is something we’ve been so isolated. So you get to like work on a project with a bunch of other people and kind of like that feeling of making new friends again is not something I feel like we have had a lot of in the past year. It has been really refreshing to get to collaborate because typically we’re on tour and we’re with like, you know, two or three other bands. And it’s almost like that whole evening that we curate together every night is a collaboration; we’re all curating this whole energy. And, and so it’s kind of fun to be able to work virtually like with these artists to similarly like create an experience together and just like make new friends.
ZJ: You not only curated this but, through social media you were showing how you were hand-making these on the risograph. Were there unexpected challenges in taking this, you know, this concept, this idea of making a comic and then having to do the physical production, fulfillment, all of that side of the world that, you know, sometimes people don’t think about, especially in a digital age where it’s very easy to draw something, throw it up on Instagram or Twitter and say, here it is, it exists now.
NB: Yeah, this has been like, what day? Six of the process of it. And, you know, it’s one of the 20 sides. So it, and it’s two layers per side. It’s really just being organized about it. Alex was like very good at being organized of what layer we’re doing when, on what side. And just to not, you know, screw up, but we not saying we’re perfect. We’ve definitely lost a few things, like today we lost a stack, so we’ll have to redo those, but it doesn’t happen in five minutes. It’s definitely taken us a week to do, but it’s been fun. It’s a fun challenge. And it’s kind of why we got, we tried to do it.
AL: Yeah. We’ve been doing Riso printing for the past year pretty heavily. And I feel like all of our skills have cumulated to this project. And we feel pretty confident in it, but at the same time, it’s definitely a lot more labor intensive than just a digital publication, but it’s a fun, you know, we’re just looking for any reason to do a creative thing right now. Because we’re still very deep in the fandom, it’s nice to have something to keep us busy.
NB: And it also just feels good to hold it in your hand. Like once we get like a print and it’s like, this page is done, you’re like, holy cow, this feels so good. It’s not just like on your phone. You know, it’s like, this is in my hand right now. This looks cool. Yeah. So that feels good.
ZJ: What’s next for the band?
AL: We’ve had such blinders on with this project. We are trying to see like what makes sense in terms of touring? We’ve got our fingers crossed for maybe doing a couple shows in the fall. Like we probably won’t have full fledged tour until next year, but just a couple shows to get us back in the groove. So people on the east coast can hopefully look forward to that. And perhaps even a virtual performance.
NB: And we might be recording like a little secret thing.
AL: I know we can’t say that much because we haven’t announced it all yet. We’ve got some fun stuff coming though between real performances, recorded virtual performances and recordings. So it’s all coming,
Zachary Jenkins runs ComicsXF and is a co-host on the podcast “Battle of the Atom.” Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside of all this.
